Now 26 years old, Scout (Jeanne Louise) returns home to Maycomb, Alabama, where she encounters many changes. Her brother has died. Her heroic father, Atticus Finch, who defended the wrongly accused man in the earlier acclaimed novel (To Kill a Mockingbird) is still carrying on his legal practice and his role as a wise pillar of the community, despite his advancing age. He is approached to defend a black man who has killed a white man in a motor vehicle accident.

Scout renews contact with old friends, including Hank who still hopes that she will marry him. The old places spark memories told in deftly written flashbacks that beautifully evoke the atmosphere of a small southern town in the heat of summer. Some flashbacks– an imagined pregnancy following a chaste kiss and an escapade with falsies at a school dance-- are hilarious renditions of ‘tweenage’ angst, typical of any time or place.

But Scout is disgusted by the social spying, the rumors that easily build, and the latent racial hatred that lurks everywhere. The memories of her “color-blind” childhood make her confrontation with the cruel, racial tensions in the more recent time all the more upsetting. Even her beloved nanny, Calpurnia, is now alienated with distrust and repressed anger. The climax comes when she witnesses her father, as chair of a meeting, give the floor to a notorious racist. Scout confronts him and he launches into a long self-justifying and not entirely convincing defense of the need for free speech. The disquieting conclusion is ambiguous.

In Melbourne, Australia, Hector and Aisha are hosting a big barbecue for their families and friends who come with several children. Hector’s somewhat controlling Greek parents appear too, bringing along too much food and their chronic disapproval of his non-Greek wife despite the two healthy grandkids and her success as a veterinarian. Aisha’s less-well-off friends, Rosie and Gary, arrive with their cherubic-looking son, Hugo, who at age three, is still breastfed and being raised according to a hippie parenting style that manages to be both sheltering and permissive. Hugo has a meltdown over a cricket game, which the older kids have let him join. He raises a bat to strike another child, when Hector’s cousin, Harry, intervenes to protect his own son. Hugo kicks Harry who slaps him. Rosie and Gary call it child abuse and notify the police.

The aftermath of the slap is told in several fulsome chapters, each devoted to a different individual’s perspective: among them, Hector, Aisha, Harry, Rosie, Hector’s father, and the teenaged babysitter Connie. Harry is rendered miserable by Rosie and Gary’s aggressive lawsuit against him. Connie believes she is in love with a philandering, substance-abusing Hector who in turn has unscrupulously led her on. Recognizing its alienation of her friends, Rosie sticks to her legal pursuit of Harry although she worries about the drain on their meagre finances, the exposure of Gary's drinking, and the anticipated criticism of their parenting style. Aisha is fed up with her husband’s edginess and submission to his parents, and she flirts with escape in the form of a handsome stranger at a conference.

This is an opera based on Elyn R. Saks’s best-selling book The Center Cannot Hold. Subtitled “My
Journey Through Madness,” the memoir recounts the author’s struggle with
schizophrenia. Here, Saks has
collaborated with composer/psychiatrist Kenneth B. Wells on the opera’s
libretto.

The librettists utilize the device of having three different
singers portray Elyn. One manifestation,
the “Lady of the Charts,” represents her when psychotic. The others are Elyn as a law student and the
present day Professor Saks as a law professor.
Another dramatic device involves the use of a chorus to embody the
protagonist’s schizophrenic delusions.
At the height of her paranoia, as Elyn sings Beethoven’s 5th
Symphony in an effort to keep herself together, the chorus recalls the
Symphony’s opening notes by singing “Elyn must die.”

The opera opens with Elyn as Professor Saks reflecting on
her childhood. Even then there were signs of the illness that, to quote a
famous poem by William Butler Yeats, ensures “the center cannot hold” in Elyn’s
life. During the first act, Elyn, a Yale law student, becomes psychotic in
front of her friends and is hospitalized. In a Connecticut hospital she is put
in restraints and treated by various mental health professionals. She imagines
she hears demons threatening to kill her. Elyn’s diagnosis and condition overwhelm her
parents, who have been called by the hospital.

In the second act, Elyn works to reintegrate her fragmented
mind. She is determined to get back to
law school. She is released from the
hospital. She finds an antipsychotic medication, with fewer side effects, that
she can live with. She resolves to devote her career to mental health law. At the conclusion of the opera, Elyn
anticipates graduation. She has been instrumental
in winning a class action suit against the use of restraints in psychiatric
patients. Her parents, friends and
doctors proclaim their pride in her accomplishments.

In 1869 in the remote northern Scottish village of Culduie,
teenager Roderick (Roddy) Macrae brutally murders his neighbor, Lachlan “Broad’
Mackenzie, and two others. He readily admits to his crime, motivated, he says, by
a desire to end the dreadful vendetta that Broad waged against his widowed father.
The sympathetic defence lawyer, Andrew Simpson, urges him to write an account
of the events leading up to the tragedy.

Roddy agrees. In a surprisingly articulate essay, the young
crofter describes his motive, originating with his birth and escalating through
the lad’s mercy killing of an injured sheep belonging to Broad (interpreted as
wanton), Broad’s sexual torment of his sister and mother, and his abuse of
power as a constable that strips the family of land, crops, and finally their home.
Given Roddy’s passivity, intelligence, and previously clean
record, Simpson prepares a defence of temporary insanity and brings two
physicians to assess his client, one a purported expert in the new field of
medical criminology. The jury trial proceeds with an almost verbatim transcript derived
from newspaper sources. The reader is able to juxtapose Roderick’s account with
that presented in court. To report the outcome here would reveal too much.

Intern, Maggie Altman, begins her postgraduate training in a large Texas hospital where a new computerized system has been implemented to improve service. She pours heart and soul into her work, but her admissions always seem to be the sickest patients who keep dying, sometimes inexplicably. Maggie becomes suspicious of her colleagues and of Dr. Milton Silber, an irrascible, retired clinician with no fondness for the new technology. Silber also happens to be a financial genius. Overhearing conversations and finding puzzling papers, Maggie imagines a scam, in which her supervisors may be eliminating dying patients to reduce costs, improve statistics, and siphon funds to their own pockets.

The bad outcomes for Maggie's patients are noticed and criticized, and she is pressured to drop out, switch hospitals, or go back into research. She senses that the perpetrators are aware of her suspicions and send her the worst patients in an effort to eliminate her. She trusts no one. These worries are compounded by her own illness and her accidental discovery in the morgue of a traffic in unclaimed bodies. With the help of excellent clinical skills, true friends, Dr. Silber, and a new love interest who is a budding financial genius, she survives physical and emotional violence and solves the mystery of patient homicides, poisonings, and fraud.

Approaching age 60 and childless, Fiona Maye is
a family court judge who must decide if 17 year-old Adam has the right to
refuse blood transfusions for his leukemia. He and his parents are Jehovah’s
Witnesses. The Children Act does not
allow a child to make this decision until age 18. Fiona is an atheist and her
35-year marriage to an academic is falling apart. She takes the extraordinary step of visiting
Adam to know him and understand his conviction. He is beautiful and gifted, he
writes poetry and plays violin. Why would he not want to try to live? She makes
her decision having no idea if it will be morally, legally or medically right. To say more would spoil it.

In 1780, Thomas Silkstone, a young American
surgeon and anatomist, is invited by Lydia to establish the cause of death of her
brother, Lord Crick, a dissolute who held the Oxfordshire estate that she will
inherit. Her goal is to absolve her husband of the suspicion of murder;
however, as the investigation proceeds, it increasingly seems that her husband is
guilty after all.

The earnest young doctor methodically
examines each new lead—performing experiments on tissues and with various
poisons in his effort to determine the cause of death – and in so doing solve a
murder. Before long, another person is dead and Thomas is in love with Lydia, a
scarcely concealed complication that calls his testimony into question.

On a stormy night in 1968 a retired, widowed schoolteacher in rural Pennsylvania opens her door to find a young couple, she white, he African American, wrapped in blankets, drenched, and silent. Letting them in changes her life. They have escaped together from a nearby mental institution most locals simply call "The School." The young woman has recently given birth. When Martha lets them in, her life changes forever. Supervisors from "the School" show up at the door, the young man escapes, and the young woman, memorably beautiful, is taken back into custody. The only words she is able to speak out of what we learn has been a years-long silence are "Hide her." Thus she leaves her newborn baby to be raised by a stranger. The remaining chapters span more than forty years in the stories of these people, linked by fate and love and the brutalities of an unreformed system that incarcerated, neglected, and not infrequently abused people who were often misdiagnosed. Homan, the young man who loved Lynnie, the beautiful girl from the institution, was deaf, not retarded. Lynnie was simply "slow," but a gifted artist who recorded many of the events of her life in drawings she shared only with the one attendant who valued and loved her. Though her pregnancy resulted from being raped by a staff member, the deaf man longs to protect her and care for the baby. Years separate them; Homan eventually learns signing; Lynnie's sister befriends her and an exposé results in the closure of the institution. Over those years Lynnie and Homan witness much cultural change in treatment of people like them who were once systematically excluded. They find social identities that once would have been entirely unavailable to them. And eventually, after literal and figurative journeys of discovery, they rediscover each other.

The book offers a detailed account by one of the
nation’s leading cancer researchers of developments in chemotherapy over the past several decades, as well as
the recent history of surgical and radiation treatments in the “war on
cancer”—a term he resisted at first but finally embraced with full
understanding of its implications. The narrative touches on many of the writer’s
own struggles over economic, political, and moral implications of
what a NYT reviewer described as a “take-no-prisoners” approach to cure. He also includes stories about disagreements
with other researchers that give some insight into the acrimony that is part of high-stakes science. At
the NIH and later as head of the National Cancer Institute, DeVita faced many
decisions about distribution of resources, how much to put patients at risk,
and whom to include in clinical trials.
He provides his own point of view on those controversies frankly. Not much mention is made of the causes of
cancer, of nutritional or other complementary approaches, or the environmental
factors in the spread of cancer. The strong focus on the book is on the
development of chemotherapeutic treatments that have succeeded in raising
survival rates, though few current statistics are cited.

When nine-year-old Rob Cole, child of poor 11th-century
English farmers, loses his mother, he is consigned to the care of a
barber-surgeon who takes him around the countryside, teaching him to juggle,
sell potions of questionable value, and assist him in basic medical care that
ranges from good practical first-aid to useless ritual. When, eight years later, his mentor dies, Rob
takes the wagon, horse, and trappings and embarks on a life-changing journey
across Europe to learn real medicine from Avicenna in Persia. Through a Jewish physician practicing in
England, he has learned that Avicenna’s school is the only place to learn real
medicine and develop the gift he has come to recognize in himself. In addition to skill, he discovers in
encounters with patients that he has sharp and accurate intuitions about their
conditions, but little learning to enable him to heal them. The journey with a caravan of Jewish
merchants involves many trials, including arduous efforts to learn Persian and
pass himself off as a Jew, since Christians are treated with hostility in the
Muslim lands he is about to enter.
Refused at first at Avicenna’s school, he finally receives help from the
Shah and becomes a star student. His
medical education culminates in travel as far as India, and illegal ventures
into the body as he dissects the dead under cover of darkness. Ultimately he marries the daughter of a
Scottish merchant he had met but parted with in his outgoing journey, and,
fleeing the dangers of war, returns with her and their two sons to the British
Isles, where he sets up practice in Scotland.